5 ms·

Lisp was always such an odd animal, kind of the rotary engine of computer science. Although provably superior in every respect, no one ever seemed to build any

Lisp was always such an odd animal, kind of the rotary engine of computer science. Although provably superior in every respect, no one ever seemed to build anything with it. Programmers in the thread, when was the moment you bailed on lisp? For me it was when I saw some lisp longbeard on a message board answer a newbie's question by pasting a script that would have deleted their filesystem. I think it was meant to be some kind of teaching moment. At that point I decided this was maybe too hardcore a language community for me. I'm curious to hear what broke others, particularly since this message board infamously began as a lisp fan site.

shaunxcode 3y ago
This is such a tired trope. Scheme, CL and clojure all have people building incredible things with them. Not to mention things like Cisco buying the company behind chez scheme. Ask yourself why. Ask yourself why nubank bought cognitect. Consider spritely goblins being built in scheme. lisp is a weapon.
- p_l 3y ago
  Unfortunately, the story about script wiping the filesystem is... well known, though I don't necessarily want to search the archives for it right now.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- chii 3y ago
  > all have people building incredible things with them. what the trope really meant is that why these lisp dialects do not become mainstream despite the sales pitch of it being superior. The examples mentioned are niche at most. Why is it that you are more likely to see a nodejs app or a java app, if you randomly sampled any software project?
  - lispm 3y ago
    Probably because vendors with deep financial pockets specifically designed/developed/selected these languages (JavaScript, Java, ...) to become popular, integrated them into their offerings and invested billions into it? It didn't save SUN (the developer of Java), which got into financial trouble and was bought by Oracle. Lisp was already at the end of its hype cycle and had entered the death zone (-> the AI winter end 80s), when the Internet took off start/mid 90s. L*** was a forbidden word in the 90s.
  - dig1 3y ago
    These are not languages for wide masses, TBH; they often require a paradigm shift, and you need to change how you approach the problems. Take, for example, Scheme - it doesn't have for/while loops out of the box, yet you can build a CLOS-like OO system on top of it (which can be considered one of the most powerful OO systems out there). Clojure doesn't allow you to mutate variables but has a killer multithreading ability without complicating the language (compared to Scala or Rust). Common Lisp adds a ton of stuff not found in mainstream languages: CLOS, loop DSL, macros that will generate macros that will create macros, and so on. Quite similar is with other non-lispy languages: Haskell, OCaml, APL dialects... Yes, they are often superior (code is more concise, expressive, or faster), but the mainstream prefers to stay in the comfort zone of C-like languages and the way of thinking.
  - cracrecry 3y ago
    >Why is it that you are more likely to see a nodejs app or a java app, if you randomly sampled any software project? It comes from History. Lisp was way more powerful than anything else but it was ultra expensive as it required special hardware that "hardware accelerated" the Lisp code. The basic Lisp instructions were opcodes. We are talking about USD 100K-200K of the time for a single machine. Big multinationals discovering oil in Saudi Arabia could pay that(and paid that for 3d visualizations of the terrain explosions tests),big TV networks,multinationals, but it was out of reach for mere mortals. In normal machines, Lisp was extremely slow as it was interpreted without native opcodes. The first languages in microcomputers were basically Basic. Microcomputers were toys compared with any serious machines but normal people could buy that. So programmers started using assembly to bridge the gap between underpowered micro-computers and the serious machines they have seen on their work of had heard about. Using lots of efficiency tricks they managed to extract more and more power from those machines. More people bought microcomputers, prices went down, machines got more powerful. Over time efficiency was not as necessary and companies started using C, that evolved into Obj C, and C++, java, python and the languages that we have today like javascript(developed with C tools). There were billions invested in making that change possible. Billions that Lisp did not get.
- idlewords 3y ago
  The trope is tired because it's been true for so many decades
wglb 3y ago
Regarding what lisp is used for, to quote Kent Pitman: But please don't assume this is an exhaustive list, and please don't assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bioinformatics, B2B and Ecommerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list. Common Lisp really is a general language capable of a lot more than these few incidental application areas, even if this web page doesn't totally bring that out. And I am certainly not broken.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
whartung 3y ago
I’m sorry you had that experience. I came to Lisp in the 90’s, forged in the fires of many a comp.lang.lisp flame war. But I’ve not seen anything like you describe. And I’ve not seen anything like that in the, albeit casual, contact I’ve had with the Lisp community since then (mostly IRC). I think the Lisp community has always been quite friendly. Especially today. Just my experience, I wouldn’t let that one experience drive you away. Modern books a projects in the field are excellent and exciting. To your question, I’ve never really left Lisp, it’s just not been a good fit with my work or colleagues. But I will forthrightly say I’ve argued against it when a developer wanted to incorporate Clojure into our enterprise project. I didn’t feel it was worth introducing for a couple hundred lines of code since nobody else on the team knew it.
- koito17 3y ago
  He's referencing an infamous c.l.l thread where pjb wrote some code that would delete all files in your hard drive.[1] I find it silly to disregard a whole family of languages over a well-known nuisance on c.l.l, but I do not blame the poster. The proverb "one rotten apple spoils the bunch" comes to mind. In any case, this isn't the only place where pjb was simply toxic and encouraging people to stay away from a community or programming language. There is another infamous post of his on comp.lang.objective-c that is simply rude, no way to justify it.[2] [1] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/iKNvssI5pE4 https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/iKNvssI5pE4 [2] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.objective-c/c/q8Emsjoyogc https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.objective-c/c/q8Emsjoy...
  - kagevf 3y ago
    pjb is very knowledgeable and helpful on IRC these days, though. People change . . .
  - kazinator 3y ago
    > I find it silly to disregard a whole family of languages over a well-known nuisance on c.l.l For years, c.l.l was plagued by a trolling Ruby advocate, who included blatantly racist content in some of his posts and signature lines. So, don't use Ruby.
kazinator 3y ago
Why are you writing in English? Some notable serial killers were English speakers. Never mind hard drives, they wiped out entire persons.
- idlewords 3y ago
  Because of the wide install base and huge number of legacy speakers. My native language is much more elegant.
  - kazinator 3y ago
    I visited your country and was pickpocketed there. It might not even have been your countryman, since it was at an international airport terminal, but I've nevertheless given up on the language since. Too hard-core a place for me to visit, you know?
butterisgood 3y ago
Not broken. Use it everyday.

shaunxcode 3y ago

This is such a tired trope. Scheme, CL and clojure all have people building incredible things with them. Not to mention things like Cisco buying the company behind chez scheme. Ask yourself why. Ask yourself why nubank bought cognitect. Consider spritely goblins being built in scheme. lisp is a weapon.

p_l 3y ago
Unfortunately, the story about script wiping the filesystem is... well known, though I don't necessarily want to search the archives for it right now.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
chii 3y ago
> all have people building incredible things with them. what the trope really meant is that why these lisp dialects do not become mainstream despite the sales pitch of it being superior. The examples mentioned are niche at most. Why is it that you are more likely to see a nodejs app or a java app, if you randomly sampled any software project?
- lispm 3y ago
  Probably because vendors with deep financial pockets specifically designed/developed/selected these languages (JavaScript, Java, ...) to become popular, integrated them into their offerings and invested billions into it? It didn't save SUN (the developer of Java), which got into financial trouble and was bought by Oracle. Lisp was already at the end of its hype cycle and had entered the death zone (-> the AI winter end 80s), when the Internet took off start/mid 90s. L*** was a forbidden word in the 90s.
- dig1 3y ago
  These are not languages for wide masses, TBH; they often require a paradigm shift, and you need to change how you approach the problems. Take, for example, Scheme - it doesn't have for/while loops out of the box, yet you can build a CLOS-like OO system on top of it (which can be considered one of the most powerful OO systems out there). Clojure doesn't allow you to mutate variables but has a killer multithreading ability without complicating the language (compared to Scala or Rust). Common Lisp adds a ton of stuff not found in mainstream languages: CLOS, loop DSL, macros that will generate macros that will create macros, and so on. Quite similar is with other non-lispy languages: Haskell, OCaml, APL dialects... Yes, they are often superior (code is more concise, expressive, or faster), but the mainstream prefers to stay in the comfort zone of C-like languages and the way of thinking.
- cracrecry 3y ago
  >Why is it that you are more likely to see a nodejs app or a java app, if you randomly sampled any software project? It comes from History. Lisp was way more powerful than anything else but it was ultra expensive as it required special hardware that "hardware accelerated" the Lisp code. The basic Lisp instructions were opcodes. We are talking about USD 100K-200K of the time for a single machine. Big multinationals discovering oil in Saudi Arabia could pay that(and paid that for 3d visualizations of the terrain explosions tests),big TV networks,multinationals, but it was out of reach for mere mortals. In normal machines, Lisp was extremely slow as it was interpreted without native opcodes. The first languages in microcomputers were basically Basic. Microcomputers were toys compared with any serious machines but normal people could buy that. So programmers started using assembly to bridge the gap between underpowered micro-computers and the serious machines they have seen on their work of had heard about. Using lots of efficiency tricks they managed to extract more and more power from those machines. More people bought microcomputers, prices went down, machines got more powerful. Over time efficiency was not as necessary and companies started using C, that evolved into Obj C, and C++, java, python and the languages that we have today like javascript(developed with C tools). There were billions invested in making that change possible. Billions that Lisp did not get.
idlewords 3y ago
The trope is tired because it's been true for so many decades

wglb 3y ago

Regarding what lisp is used for, to quote Kent Pitman: But please don't assume this is an exhaustive list, and please don't assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bioinformatics, B2B and Ecommerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list. Common Lisp really is a general language capable of a lot more than these few incidental application areas, even if this web page doesn't totally bring that out. And I am certainly not broken.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

whartung 3y ago

I’m sorry you had that experience. I came to Lisp in the 90’s, forged in the fires of many a comp.lang.lisp flame war. But I’ve not seen anything like you describe. And I’ve not seen anything like that in the, albeit casual, contact I’ve had with the Lisp community since then (mostly IRC). I think the Lisp community has always been quite friendly. Especially today. Just my experience, I wouldn’t let that one experience drive you away. Modern books a projects in the field are excellent and exciting. To your question, I’ve never really left Lisp, it’s just not been a good fit with my work or colleagues. But I will forthrightly say I’ve argued against it when a developer wanted to incorporate Clojure into our enterprise project. I didn’t feel it was worth introducing for a couple hundred lines of code since nobody else on the team knew it.

koito17 3y ago
He's referencing an infamous c.l.l thread where pjb wrote some code that would delete all files in your hard drive.[1] I find it silly to disregard a whole family of languages over a well-known nuisance on c.l.l, but I do not blame the poster. The proverb "one rotten apple spoils the bunch" comes to mind. In any case, this isn't the only place where pjb was simply toxic and encouraging people to stay away from a community or programming language. There is another infamous post of his on comp.lang.objective-c that is simply rude, no way to justify it.[2] [1] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/iKNvssI5pE4 https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/iKNvssI5pE4 [2] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.objective-c/c/q8Emsjoyogc https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.objective-c/c/q8Emsjoy...
- kagevf 3y ago
  pjb is very knowledgeable and helpful on IRC these days, though. People change . . .
- kazinator 3y ago
  > I find it silly to disregard a whole family of languages over a well-known nuisance on c.l.l For years, c.l.l was plagued by a trolling Ruby advocate, who included blatantly racist content in some of his posts and signature lines. So, don't use Ruby.

kazinator 3y ago

Why are you writing in English? Some notable serial killers were English speakers. Never mind hard drives, they wiped out entire persons.

idlewords 3y ago
Because of the wide install base and huge number of legacy speakers. My native language is much more elegant.
- kazinator 3y ago
  I visited your country and was pickpocketed there. It might not even have been your countryman, since it was at an international airport terminal, but I've nevertheless given up on the language since. Too hard-core a place for me to visit, you know?

butterisgood 3y ago

Not broken. Use it everyday.